Bad Day with Rain
by FallenPride
Summary: Complete AU, Rodney gets in a car accident after having a very bad day.


**Original Title:** Shitty Day with Rain  
**Raiting: **PG13 (for language)  
**Warnings:** Language. Complete AU.  
**Notes:** I wrote this one for cottontail (LJ) after she'd had a very bad day and she asked for John, Rodney, and a car accident. Not Beta-read, all mistakes are my own, but I tried very hard to fix them all. Hope you enjoy!

* * *

Rodney cursed under his breath as he strained to see between the beating wiper blades slicing across his front window. He cursed at nature for making it rain, today of all days. And he cursed at whatever series of events had produced Abrams and Adams – two of the brightest scientists he'd ever had the pleasure of finding, who when put in the same lab space couldn't come up with two brain cells to rub together.

He'd ended up sending most of his staff home or to the hospital after those two had caused a small explosion just outside of lab three. Nothing all that serious and a fairly every day experience for them. Except today was doomed to failure before it had even begun, because from that small explosion outside of lab three, a fire got started in the corner of lab six.

As luck would have it, lab six had been blessedly empty. But Lady Luck was a vicious bitch who liked to see Rodney suffer, and the reason lab six was empty was because they were working on the fire suppression system. So no fire detectors were working, no one was in the room to put out the minor little fire, and no one the wiser that the fire just kept spreading until the smoke began to leek into labs five, eight, and nine.

The worst of it was, was that Rodney couldn't prove that the vortex of stupidity created when Abrams and Adams were within twenty feet of each other was to blame. It was entirely possible that the fire would have started no matter if the explosion had occurred or not. He couldn't even prove that they were the cause of the damn explosion in the first place. All he knew for certain was that his labs were closed until the fire crews released the building, and even after that labs four through nine would be out of commission until the damages were repaired, leaving him with only three operational public labs, and his own private one that he just might have to start sharing.

And then to top everything off – from the empty coffee can this morning to the god damn closure of his labs – it had started to rain. And not just a gentle drizzle, but a heavy persistent rain. He hated the rain. It just made a bad day worse.

Turning the corner, Rodney didn't see the car stopped at the stop sign. He'd made the turn during that moment in time when he was mostly blind to the road because all he could see was water running down in sheets across his window. So he didn't see the car stopped at the stop sign, but he did feel the thing when his front bumper made contact with the back bumper.

Then his wiper blades cut across the window and he was staring at the back of a very nice black car. And that just made everything so much better.

Throwing the car in to reverse, Rodney backed up a few feet from the car he'd just hit, slammed it into park and cut the engine and hit the little button to turn on the caution lights.

"Perfect. Just fucking perfect," he cursed loudly. "Just what today needs. Another claim on my god damn insurance." Leaning over to reach into his glove box, Rodney pulled out the little leather folder with his insurance information and opened his door to check on the damage.

The driver of the other car was already out and staring at the back bumper. The rain made it difficult to see anything that wasn't pressed against the tip of his nose, so Rodney turned his attention to his own sorry little vehicle to check for damages.

He couldn't see anything except that his licence plate now angled slightly to the right.

He couldn't see anything else wrong with the front of his car. Not with the rain pouring down on him like it was. There wasn't enough street light to see anything clearly by, and he'd left his damn flash light in the labs after the power had gone out last week.

"Hey, you alright?" the other driver, a man by the sound of his voice, shouted to him.

Rodney waved dismissively at his question. "I'll survive. What about you?" Rodney asked turning towards the other man.

Rodney couldn't get a good look at his face. Not with the heavy rain and the intermittent flashing light from his car.

"I'm sure I'll live," the other man answered in amusement. "John Sheppard," he added, offering his hand.

Rodney reached over to shake John's hand. "Rodney McKay." There was no need to put his title in front of his name. Rodney had no doubt that as soon as this guy heard the word doctor he'd see money signs and change his tune about not being hurt real fast.

"How's the car?" Rodney asked, looking to the vehicle in question. It took him a moment before he realized something was wrong with what he was seeing and another moment before he figured out what. There were no caution lights blinking. He couldn't have been driving so fast that he'd taken out both the lights. It hadn't even been that much of a bump in the first place!

John shrugged again and turned back to his car. "Doesn't look like you did more than scratch the plate. And with the rain pouring like this, I can't see if the paint was scratched. So everything looks fine to me."

Rodney stared at him for a minute before the day finally caught up with him. "Why don't you have your caution lights on? Why didn't you have your lights on in the first place? I would have seen the back lights of a car when I made the turn if they had been on!"

John turned back to him, and Rodney thought he saw the other guy frown at him. "Battery's dead. You wouldn't happen to have a set of jumper cables in your car would you?"

"No," Rodney answered. His jumper cables were also back at the lab. They had been removed from his car the same time the flashlight had migrated homes. They had been the reason that power had been restored to lab five so that they could finish running the simulations.

"Fuck," John cursed, kicking at the ground. "My cell phone died, so I stuck in the car charger and plugged the damn thing in and then the whole fucking car died."

"There's an empty lot just across the street," Rodney told him. "And a diner just on the other side of the lot. I'll help you push this thing into the lot and we can exchange information in the diner once I've gotten caffeine in my system."

"Deal," John told him.

Thirty seven minutes later and they were sitting at the counter in the diner, sipping on coffee and waiting for their food to arrive. They'd pushed John's car into the empty lot, where it sat placidly in the rain. Rodney had jogged back and gotten his own car moved into the lot as well, a few feet from John's. They had exchanged names, numbers, and insurance information.

"Don't you have an emergency kit in your car?" Rodney asked, gulping down the sludge the waitress had called coffee. "You were just sitting there, with no warning lights, in the middle of a freaking down pour. You had to expect you were going to get hit. There aren't even street lamps on that side of the road for Christ's sake!"

John just lifted an eye brow, completely unruffled by Rodney's sudden burst of outrage. "My battery had just died on me. I didn't exactly have time to go hunting for a set of flairs in my trunk or anything." He sipped at his coffee in direct contrast to Rodney's gulping. "Besides, if I'd have been digging in my trunk you would have hit me instead of my car."

"Thank god for small favours," Rodney muttered. "That would have been the icing on the cake."

"Shitty day too?"

"You wouldn't believe how shitty," Rodney told him gesturing for more coffee from the waitress. "First I run out of coffee this morning then I find out that the coffee place near my apartment got bought by a damn tea company. I get into work late, with no caffeine in my system, to find out not only are the review due dates been moved up but that they are due in today!

"And then Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dumb built and set off a damn bomb in the hallway, which caused a small fire in another room," Rodney tells John, with hand motions and all.

"It wouldn't have been the end of the world, except that they were upgrading the fire system in that room, and all the workers had taken a lunch break, so the fire spread. And now most of my research lab space is completely inaccessible. The fire department won't even let me into my own office," Rodney grumbled out. "My own office, which was on the other side of the building from the fire. And then to top everything off, it starts raining, and then I hit you."

John was staring at him openly. Rodney looked up for the first time and noticed that the man who'd been driving the car he'd hit was actually kind of pretty, in a manly sort of way. Rodney had to mentally shake himself for realizing that.

"Did you even breathe when you said all that?" he asked.

"Of course I breathed," Rodney scoffed. "What kind of idiot are you?"

"One that can't spit out that many words, that quickly, without choking on his own tongue," John told him.

"It's a learned skill."


End file.
